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U.S. Navy Program to Study How Troops Use Intuition

The United States Navy has started a program to investigate how members of the military can be trained to improve their “sixth sense,” or intuitive ability, during combat and other missions.

The idea for the project comes in large part from the testimony of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who have reported an unexplained feeling of danger just before they encountered an enemy attack or ran into an improvised explosive device, Navy scientists said.

“Research in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a ‘sixth sense’ through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them,” the Office of Naval Research said in an announcement late last month. The scientists managing the program — which the the naval research office is calling “revolutionary” — commonly refer to this mysterious perception as feeling one’s “Spidey sense” tingling, after the intuitive power of Spiderman.

“Evidence is accumulating that this capability, known as intuition or intuitive decision making, enables the rapid detection of patterns in ambiguous, uncertain and time restricted information contexts,” the office said, citing numerous peer-reviewed studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

The program, called Enhancing Intuitive Decision Making Through Implicit Learning, will be making available $3.85 million over four years to researchers who want to investigate how intuition works. Initial proposals are due April 15, and executives at more than a dozen companies specializing in fields like logistics, software and artificial intelligence have so far expressed interest in applying for the money.

The Navy expects the research will offer insight into the scientific basis of intuition, a concept that many in the general public confuse with the supernatural. It also hopes the findings will eventually allow military scientists and planners to build sophisticated computer models of how intuition works and to design training programs to help troops learn to better use their intuitive ability.

“There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence, combined with solid research efforts, that suggests intuition is a critical aspect of how we humans interact with our environment and how, ultimately, we make many of our decisions,” Ivy Estabrooke, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research, said in an e-mail.

“The whole goal of this research endeavor is to determine if we can develop techniques to measurably improve intuition,” she added.

The impetus for the program comes from “reports and discussions with marines and soldiers returning from deployment” in recent years, said Cmdr. Joseph Cohn, also a program manager at the naval office. “These reports from the field often detailed a ‘sixth sense’ or ‘Spidey sense’ that alerted them to an impending attack or I.E.D., or that allowed them to respond to a novel situation without consciously analyzing the situation.”

They also point to the case of Staff Sgt. Martin Richburg who, after sensing something odd about a man at an Iraqi Internet cafe, managed to save the lives of 17 cafe patrons from the improvised bomb the man had planted there.

Of course, such intuition is not always correct, and one of the research program’s goals is to find ways to fine-tune it. The program’s results are expected to be used in cyberwarfare, unmanned drone operations and other areas in which members of the military are called to act in situations where reliable information is not available or where the amount of information that must be processed is overwhelmingly large.

“This is a very creative idea on the Navy’s part,” said John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University. Mr. Kounios, whose work is among the studies cited in the announcement, said he became aware of the research program only a few days ago.

“Military equipment is very expensive,” he said in an e-mail, “but training is, by comparison, relatively cheap. Not only can such training help to save lives, it can help military personnel to more effectively use their equipment.”

Mr. Kounios said he believed the Navy’s goal – to train troops how to use their intuition better – was possible, but he emphasized that the intuitive ability in question was not a supernatural one.

“The term ‘sixth sense’ is evocative, but risks conveying the idea that intuition is a psychic or paranormal phenomenon,” he said.

When an idea appears as an “aha” moment, Mr. Kounios added, “people often think that this is a psychic phenomenon because they don’t know where the idea came from. But it’s the product of unconscious information processing.”

Some studies suggest that the neural and cognitive processes involved in intuitive decision-making actually share many similarities with those involved in “implicit learning,” or learning that happens without the learner being aware of what was learned or how, the Navy said.

In addition to enhanced military training, researchers also want to use the new program to develop enhanced technology. Ezra Sidran, a computer scientist, said he planned to apply for the naval research funding to investigate “unsupervised machine learning,” in which a computer program independently “analyzes, remembers and learns.”

“When Pandora suggests a song for you or when Amazon suggests a book for you,” Mr. Sidran said, “this is an example of supervised machine learning” because “you, albeit unknowingly, are supervising the learning of the machine” with each book or song selection.

“In unsupervised machine learning,” he explained, “the program looks at all the unsorted data and – without any human intervention – clusters the data into separate categories.” After that sorting process, experts can then identify “these clusters as places an I.E.D. is likely to be hidden or places where an ambush is likely to occur.”

Michael Sick, president of Serene Software, a technology consulting firm in Jacksonville, Fla., also said he was considering submitting a proposal for funding. His research, he said, would most likely be on how to create basic computer models of intuition “that can be applied to any number of problems,” including drones and video games.

“There are endless applications to this type of technology,” Mr. Sick said.

For the Navy, the program’s four-year timeline may be just the beginning.

“If the work produces new insights into our understanding of intuition and the neural basis, then it may be expanded into a longer program,” said Ms. Estabrooke of the research office, “but this is an initial effort.”

Don Tucker, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon whose work is also cited in the Navy’s announcement, said the research eventually “could improve training not only in the military, but also in sports and many job settings.”

“Spiderman had superpowers,” Mr. Tucker said. “But maybe the rest of us can learn to use the experience of the intuitive cognition we have.”

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